Driven by the fruition of information and communications technologies (ICTs) – in an effort to deepen the consciousness of our socio-technological landscape – inQUERY aims to explore the rapidly evolving face of research and how it continues to shape our relationship with information.

ICTs now afford certain resourcefulness, creativity, unlike ever before, that empower us in the gathering, transmission, and storing of information. Their sophisticated functionality only streamlines a greater ease in processing said information, analyzing it, and most affecting of all, manipulating it. With the physical boundaries of time and space becoming all the more irrelevant, in a world where information has always meant power, such resourcefulness and functionality only seem to summon more questions:

Given this technology, are we to feel safer, or all the more threatened than ever before?

What is this distinction between sender and receiver anymore? Just how blurred have these lines become between presenter and audience, of teacher and student, leader and supporter?

Who gets to research? Who gets to write? Who is allowed to create? And who’s going to stop us?

Just how much do we actually know about this hastily advancing information age?

Wikis, online maps, location data, web analytics, social media, blogs, crowdsourcing projects…. only begin to skim the surface of the possibilities enabled by this innovation. As this futuristic new realm continues to unfold and mature, the opportunities, the threats, only seem to prove all the more endless. It is these same ICTs that give way to social endeavours such as podcasting – mediums that help us reconcile such issues.

Through the research of specific case studies, we can better understand the evolution of professional writing and research, and, in an even grander scope, the future we’re steadily making contact with. In a time seemingly governed by the powers of technology – an age of already too much information – one might not have that same luxury of unawareness they may have had once before.

Welcome to inQUERY.

- Dennis Bayazitov

From Scratch Media is managed by Stephanie Bell, Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at York University.